Book Image

Web Services Testing with soapUI

By : Charitha Kankanamge
Book Image

Web Services Testing with soapUI

By: Charitha Kankanamge

Overview of this book

Quality is a key to success of service-oriented projects. Utilization of proper tools is important to the outcome of web service testing methodology. Being the leading open source web services testing tool, soapUI helps to build robust and flexible automated tests in a productive manner. "Web Services Testing with soapUI" guides you on adopting best web service testing mechanisms with the industry leading open source testing tool, soapUI. You will learn to use soapUI effectively in testing service-oriented solutions focusing on testing functional as well as non-functional characteristics of web services. SoapUI is capable of testing JDBC data sources, web applications, RESTful services and web services exposed over transports such as JMS. The book discusses all these features and much more, in detail, through practical and clear examples. This book is focused on learning soapUI in order to test web services in an effective manner. It starts with a general introduction to service-oriented architecture (SOA) followed by testing aspects of service-oriented solutions. This book aims to give readers a comprehensive overview of usage of soapUI in SOA and web services testing projects. Starting with an overview of SOA and web services testing, you will quickly get your hands dirty with a sample project which makes use of open source web service engine, Apache Axis2. All demonstrations and hands-on exercises are based on this sample project. The tests in a soapUI project are organized into TestSuites, TestCases and TestSteps. You will also learn how soapUI can be used for both functional and non-functional testing. The book then teaches how by using groovy scripting and integrating with Junit and maven, soapUI can easily be used in automated web services testing. By the end, you'llhave learned to test functional and non-functional aspects of web services and automate by integrating into continuous build systems using soapUI.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Web Services Testing with soapUI
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Alternatives to SOAP


Though SOAP is considered as the standard protocol for web services communication, it is not the only possible transport protocol which is used. SOAP was designed to be extensible so that the other standards could be integrated into it. The WS-* extensions such as WS-Security, WS-Addressing, and WS-ReliableMessaging are associated with SOAP messaging due to this extensible nature. In addition to the platform and language agnosticism, SOAP messages can be transmitted over various transports such as HTTP, HTTPS, JMS, and SMTP among others. However, there are a few drawbacks associated with SOAP messaging. The performance degradations due to heavy XML processing and the complexities associated with the usage of various WS-* specifications are two of the most common disadvantages of the SOAP messaging model. Because of these concerns, we can identify some alternative approaches to SOAP.

REST

Due to the complexities accompanied with the SOAP model, Representational State Transfer (REST) architecture has emerged as a result. RESTful web services can be considered as a lightweight alternative to the bulky and complex SOAP based web service standards. In RESTful web services, the emphasis is on point-to-point communication over HTTP, primarily using plain old XML (POX) messages. We will discuss RESTful web services in detail in Chapter 8, Getting started with REST Testing.

Java Script Object Notation

Java Script Object Notation (JSON) is a lightweight data exchange format similar to XML. It is based on a subset of JavaScript language. JSON uses key value pairs to represent data which are carried inside the message. The following example shows how the XML payload of a SOAP message can be represented in JSON:

The corresponding JSON format of the preceding XML payload is represented by:

You may refer to http://www.json.org for more details about JSON.